I was a weird teenager. Not to say most of us weren’t, but I was really weird. I was fascinated by the Second World War (still am) and anything that felt a bit off or out of place. Eventually, that led me to the Theater of the Absurd, and to Eugène Ionesco, one of my favorite.
I remember reading Beckett, then coming across Ionesco and the whole absurd in the air, and something just clicked.
When I think about it now, between my obsession with the Second World War and my world literature teacher who kept handing me books I was probably too young to read, it feels inevitable.
Okay, but what is the Theater of the Absurd?
The Theater of the Absurd is a movement that came after the Second World War, between 1940s and 1960s when the world had already proven it didn’t make sense. It grew out of war, loss, and the feeling that the rules everyone followed didn’t really protect anyone, that the values people were raised with had quietly collapsed.
In these plays, life isn’t logical or fair or going anywhere in particular. Things repeat. Conversations go in circles. Time doesn’t behave the way it should. People talk, but they don’t really understand each other.
It’s not trying to give answers. It’s just showing what it feels like to live in a world where meaning is slippery, communication breaks down, and connection is hard to hold onto.
Pretty heavy stuff for a fifteen year old, huh?
I didn’t get it. That was the point.
To be completely honest, I don’t think I fully understood it at that age. Looking at it now, I don’t think I fully understand it even today. And for me, that’s kind of the point.
Back then I was confused, bullied, and mostly sad. I hated high school. I had very few people around me who understood me. The world felt chaotic all the time, and I didn’t know what to do with that.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I’m still confused, much less bullied, much less sad. I have more people who love me and support me. But the world feels like it’s on fire more than it ever has been, at least in my lifetime, and I genuinely struggle with how to deal with it.
That took me right back to the time I felt most similar to this version of myself.
Enter: Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was born in 1909 in Slatina, Romania, to a Romanian father and a French mother. He spent part of his childhood in France and later returned to Romania. In the late 1930s, he moved permanently back to France.
He began writing plays almost by accident while trying to learn English, noticing how empty and mechanical textbook dialogues sounded. That experience inspired The Bald Soprano.
Ionesco lived through a time when following the crowd stopped being harmless and started becoming deadly. The way people slowly give up their own thinking just to belong, or to feel safe, feels like it really haunted him.
He wasn’t bothered only by politics. It was everyday life too. The small, quiet moments where people repeat things they don’t believe, agree with things they don’t understand, and stop questioning anything at all. That kind of obedience felt dangerous, because once you stop thinking for yourself, you slowly stop being yourself.
This is where it gets weird(er?) – The Bald Soprano on stage
The first piece of his that I read was The Bald Soprano, one of his most famous plays. Weirdly enough, the same play was being performed in one of the theaters in my city at the time, which made me desperate to see it.
The play follows two English couples who meet for dinner. They talk. They talk a lot. Conversations contradict themselves, stories go nowhere, and language slowly stops working. By the end, the play loops back to the beginning, except the couples have switched places.
There is no bald soprano. The title doesn’t explain anything. It’s meaningless. And somehow, it works. It’s funny and deeply unsettling at the same time.
Now imagine seeing that live on stage.
Why this nonsense makes sense to me
Naturally, people ask why I would read things like this.
For many years, the only person I could really talk to about it was my favorite librarian, who was also the only person I knew who loved Ionesco as much as I did. Later in life, she gave me all of his plays to read.
Back then, and even more so now, I often feel powerless. With everything happening in the world today, it feels like we’re living inside one of these absurd plays. I question reality. I question myself. I live in a constant state of “is it only me who sees this?” and “how are we all looking at the same thing, while many of us choose to ignore what’s right in front of our eyes?”
I asked myself many of these same questions while researching the Second World War. No matter how much I read, watched, or listened, my mind still cannot fully comprehend how one human being, like me and like you, can do such inhumane things to another human being, like me and like you.
And maybe that’s the point?
And though we are not living through the Second World War, we are living through something. Something so absurd and bizarre that it forces the same questions.
I think many of these authors were just trying to cope with the world they were living in. To understand it. To find purpose in it. And in order to do that, the art itself had to become absurd because life and everything around was absurd.
I really believe that’s how we get movements like this. And art like this.
I’d encourage you to read one of these plays, or if you ever get the chance to see one performed, do it. It could be Ionesco, but it could also be Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, or Arthur Adamov.
See how it makes you feel. Let it sit with you. Let it make you question things. Maybe it’ll connect to the way you see the world too.
Check this one out, it will let you know a lot about Ionesco from Ionesco himself.